The Tales of Working From Home

Over the past 6 months like the rest of the creative industry and the rest of the UK as a whole, the team at Geo have found themselves having to work from home due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This new way of working from home sparked many new challenges for the team but also a plethora of new and exciting opportunities, both for the expansion of the business, but also individual growth. Like many, the first challenge was to figure out how to work from home. We all had to all find out how to turn ‘work’ and ‘home’ into an efficient ‘work from home’ solution. Whether this was setting up shop in our bedrooms, home offices, dining rooms, front rooms or maybe even the garden on those sunny lockdown days and at the same time eliminating those pesky home distractions.

6 months passed and each team member has now found and created their own ‘work from home space’, creating a Geo Studio 2.0, that we can always dip in and out of in the future when needed. The whole team were busy working hard at Geo for the whole of lockdown, working on a wide range of different types of projects for different types of clients, so in reality, except our work environments, hosting meetings and concept presentations on zoom, nothing changed at all.

The opening months we found ourselves with an abundance of digital work, for the likes of Hallet & Co solicitors based in Ashford, The Guild of Young Freemen and Marshall Harrison International to name just a few. We’ve also started to work with CharterSync, an innovative cargo chartering start-up who have developed incredibly unique software to revolutionise their industry. We’ve been helping them to refresh their brand through their brand identity and also their brand messaging. As well as redesigning and rebuilding their website. We can’t wait to show you this project once it’s finished!

Not only have we been working hard on our client’s projects but we’ve also found the opportunity to work on several in-house projects, one of which is ‘My Pub Takeaway‘, a website that lists a directory of pubs that are offering takeaway meals for people to collect or have delivered, that also has order and pay functionality built into it if needed. Noticing that pubs weren’t on takeaway platforms such as Deliveroo or JustEat we decided to pursue the idea of a Pub Takeaway platform, just as the UK went into Lockdown and prime minster Boris Johnson encouraged people to use takeaway businesses.

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Of course, you can’t have all this work without a fair share of play, just like Yin can’t live without Yang and Friday, can’t be without a post-work pint! We found ways to replace our usual Friday afternoon beers with other fun and entertaining activities that we could do digitally. We enjoyed quizzes, a few rounds of poker and to top it all off a digital escape room that took place on a website, rather than a physical room that you had to escape, how bizarre!

Ollie also ran a pizza making workshop, where we taught us how to make fresh dough and later turn it into delicious home-made pizza, you can follow his pizza-making Instagram account here @pieceofpizzaperfect.

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When lockdown regulations started to ease and laws allowed people to have socially distanced meetups, we also met up in the park for BBQ and a few beers.

Working from home has certainly been and interesting experience, full of a number of daunting challenges and exciting opportunities but we’ve learnt a lot throughout it all and have found that it has really developed us all as a team and also individually. We are trying to evolve our process by introducing ways that allow our team to work, communication and participate in meetings and presentations at full capacity whilst working remotely whilst slowing introducing ways of getting back into the studio together as a team.

In whatever environment we’re working in, our team are looking forward to continuing to work hard on exciting projects for our clients, new and old, creating some great looking and functional work, getting back into the office on a part-time basis and of course enjoying a Friday afternoon beer together.